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Well Then, No Apology Necessary

Francis Rice, chairman of the National Black Republican Association, took to the pages of Human Events in an attempt to

[B]reak the Democrats’ stranglehold on the black vote and free black Americans from the Democrat Party’s economic plantation, [by shedding] the light of truth on the Democrats. We must demonstrate that the Democrat Party policies of socialism and dependency on government handouts offer the pathway to poverty, while Republican Party principles of hard work, personal responsibility, getting a good education and ownership of homes and small businesses offer the pathway to prosperity

Rice attempts to accomplish this by telling African Americans that the Democratic Party was responsible for everything from slavery and the civil war to Jim Crowe and the Ku Klux Klan. And, according to Rice, they are still bad for African Americans today

After wrongly convincing black Americans that a minimum wage increase was a good thing, the Democrats on August 3 kept their promise and killed the minimum wage bill passed by House Republicans on July 29. The blockage of the minimum wage bill was the second time in as many years that Democrats stuck a legislative finger in the eye of black Americans.

Huh? Democrats “wrongly” convinced African Americans that increasing the minimum wage was a good thing and then decided to kill it? That doesn’t even make any sense.

Anyway, it was Republicans who killed the minimum wage increase by insisting it be tied to a tax cuts for millionaires.

Aside from Rice’s illogical arguments and disingenuous history, she at least has the courage to address the rise of the Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy” – its Nixon-era electoral gambit to gain the support of those voters angered by the Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil rights movement. Of course, she lies about that too

The 30-year odyssey of the South switching to the Republican Party began in the 1970s with President Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” which was an effort on the part of Nixon to get Christians in the South to stop voting for Democrats who did not share their values and were still discriminating against their fellow Christians who happened to be black.

Oh really? Well, someone ought to tell that to RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman because he apologized for it just last year

“By the ’70s and into the ’80s and ’90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out,” Mehlman says in his prepared text. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”

I consider it a tragedy that the party of Abraham Lincoln let go of its historic ties with the African American community. For too long my party wrote off the African American vote, and many African Americans wrote off the Republican Party.